Christian Schmid is geographer, sociologist and urban researcher. He is Titular Professor of Sociology at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, and Researcher at ETH Studio Basel / Contemporary City Institute.

Christian Schmid was born in Zurich in 1958 and studied Geography and Sociology at the University of Zurich. Since 1980, he has been active as video activist, organizer of cultural events and urban researcher. He was part of the group Ssenter for Applied Urbanism (SAU), and worked in the Rote Fabrik cultural centre in Zurich. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited numerous publications on Zurich’s urban development, on international comparative analysis of urbanization, and on theories of the city and of space. In 1991, he was a cofounder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA). In 1993–94, he was a fellow researcher at the Laboratoire de Géographie Urbaine, Université Paris X Nanterre, and in 1995–96 he worked in the interdisciplinary research project La ville: villes de crise ou crise des villes, Institut d’Architecture, Université de Genève. From 1997–2001 he was an assistant lecturer for economic geography and regional research at the Geography Department of the University of Bern. In 2003, he received his Ph.D. from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. The book with the title Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft – Henri Lefebvre und die Theorie der Produktion des Raumes (City, space and society – Henri Lefebvre and the theory of the production of space) was published in 2005. In 1999, he became the scientific director of the project Switzerland: An Urban Portrait at the ETH Studio Basel. A book with the same title was published in 2005, authored by Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron and Christian Schmid. Since 2001, he has been a lecturer in Sociology at the Faculty of Architecture of ETH Zurich. Since 2009 he has been Titular Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of ETH Zurich.